I AM a sucker for a tearjerker. I will happily weep at everything from Hamlet to The Snowman. The cheapest manipulation of my emotions will have me snuffling into my hanky.

Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe as the young married couple in Lovesong []

As the darling of the day, no-one but a churl would accuse writer Abi Morgan of cheap manipulation, The Iron Lady notwithstanding. But Lovesong comes perilously close.

An elegiac play about a married couple at the start of their marriage and in the closing stages of their lives, it is a tender, if schematic meditation on the ageing process and what that does to a childless couple who live only for each other.

As the elder couple, Sian Phillips and Sam Cox are beautifully matched – she approaching death with stoical trepidation, he caught in a kind of deferred anguish. As their younger selves, Leanne Rowe and Edward Bennett are superb, shifting subtly from the fresh passion of newlyweds to disagreements about finances, babies and niggling suspicions about fidelity.

The theatrical twist is that the couples interweave in the same place – the garden, the bedroom and the kitchen of their marital home – invariably unaware of each other’s presence as if each were taking it in turns to haunt the other. As the play progresses, they begin to interact physically in a kind of cross-generational relay as older Billy dances with young Maggie and vice versa.

This being a production by Frantic Assembly, physical theatre is evident in the passages of dance/mime that intrude sporadically. In my view, this is a dreadful mistake, appearing to be tacked on as an afterthought, as if director/choreographer duo Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett lacked confidence in the play to stand up by itself. The same is true of the constant musical underpinning, too clearly intended to open the tear ducts. The video images of flocks of starlings, cave paintings and scudding clouds are ultimately little more than decorative. They don’t do anything, are not integrated into the fabric of the text.

The performances, especially Phillips, are extremely compelling, however. It takes a fine actress to turn a painfully laboured phone call to a message machine into a heartbreaking soliloquy and she manages it with ease.

Morgan gives us clues rather than definitions; William’s dentistry, their emigration to America and Maggie’s illness are all elusive; we know as little about them by the end as we did at the beginning.

And having introduced the idea of legacy – what we leave behind if not the flesh and blood of children – she fails to pursue it, leaving a kind of ghost of a concept. Maybe that’s the point. But the tears passed me by.